Rice Bread

What began as a matter of economy became in the course of time a matter of preference— the incorporation of cooked rice or rice flour into wheat flour breads. In the Lowcountry, rice bread stood foremost among the loaves at the table. It ruled from the dawn of the nineteenth century through the 1920s when the failure of the local rice plantations halted the local surplus of rice. As baker Michael Kalanty has shown, Carolina’s famous rice bread had three ages and three recipes. The earliest, dominating the antebellum period, incorporated well-cooked rice middlins (broken rice, an offshoot of milling) into a wheat dough so that the rice composed approximately ¼ of the total mass; yeast would work on this dough and it would bake into a fine grained light loaf thought ideal for toasting. The following historical recipe captures the first kind of rice bread. It skips the step incorporating yeast into the dough to make the sponge.